It began with a message that appeared on Danah al-Mayouf’s phone from an anonymous Instagram account — a promise to help her “crush” a $5 million lawsuit she faced from a pro-government Saudi fashion model.
But, the mystery texter said, they had to meet in person.
It was December 2019, a year after the killing and dismemberment of prominent U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and al-Mayouf feared possibly being kidnapped and taken back to the kingdom like others.
“I can’t meet someone I don’t know,” al-Mayouf ultimately responded. “Especially with all the kidnappings and killings.”
Now, she’s glad she didn’t go. U.S. federal prosecutors have arrested the man, 42-year-old Ibrahim Alhussayen, on charges of lying to federal officials about using the fake account to harass and threaten Saudi critics — mostly women — living in the U.S. and Canada.
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the charges. A lawyer for Alhussayen did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
A complaint unsealed last month in federal court in Brooklyn points to a wider investigation into online harassment campaigns targeting Saudi dissidents in the U.S. and their relatives — part of a trend of transnational repression that has alarmed American authorities in recent years as various autocratic governments seek to punish critics overseas.
Earlier this year, for instance, the Justice Department revealed a plot by operatives acting on behalf of the Chinese government to stalk, harass and surveil dissidents in the U.S.
The complaint comes as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continues to clamp down on opposition, both in the kingdom and abroad, while working to burnish an image as a liberal reformer. The Saudi government has maintained in the past that its critics incite violence, broadly defined, and pose a threat to the kingdom’s security.
Nonetheless, US President Joe Biden met — and shared a cordial fist-bump with — Prince Mohammed at a diplomatic summit last week in Saudi Arabia.
The scenes drew scathing criticism from fellow Democrats and rights groups after Biden had vowed to treat the kingdom like a “pariah” and deemed Prince Mohammed responsible for Khashoggi’s killing.
From Jeddah, Biden said he raised Khashoggi’s “outrageous” murder with Prince Mohammed and was “straightforward and direct” about human rights issues, without elaborating.
“If anything like that occurs again,” Biden said of Saudi government efforts to target dissidents abroad, “they’ll get that response and much more.”
While some accuse Biden of abandoning his promise to put human rights at the heart of his foreign policy with his trip to the kingdom, the arrest of Alhussayen in New York underscores that federal officials are increasingly scrambling to prevent those rights abuses from occurring in U.S. soil.
The kingdom’s campaign to silence criticism has played out in America for some time. In 2019, U.S. prosecutors alleged Saudi Arabia recruited two Twitter employees to spy on thousands of accounts including those of American citizens and Saudi dissidents.
